


Tumblr Cats

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Animals, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 15:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1946184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dear neighbor,</p>
<p>This might sound ridiculous, but I thought that you should know that my dog is still madly in love with your cat… and has been for nearly a year!  She spends all day on the windowseat in my house, looking across the gap to where your cat sits in the windowsill.  It is the happiest time that she has.</p>
<p>Now that there are potted plants there, she is heartbroken.  But she keeps looking for your cat everywhere.  Maybe when he seemed so easy to find, she took him for granted.  Not anymore, though.</p>
<p>Maybe your potted plants could move to another window?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tumblr Cats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fueledbysquee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fueledbysquee/gifts).



> I hope that this fulfills even an inkling of what you like/were looking for... I took the prompt for "Romantic Cliches" and ran with it!

**001.**  
Puppy might have met Hugh first, but Nick is fairly certain that he at least saw the new boy across the street before Puppy met the cat. (Horrible cat. Hugh is horrible. Nick doesn’t know what Puppy sees in him.)

It was hot and humid, sticky, and Puppy kept stopping every few paces to sniff at the dewy green blades of grass between slats of sidewalk even though Nick tugged at the leash and encouraged her to _come on, Pup, I’ll let you have a popsicle if we ever get home_. The U-Haul next door opened to an explosion of mismatched colors and superhero memorabilia, and Nick thought, great; _kids_.

But instead, out of the cab of the truck jumped a really fit boy with broad shoulders in a Stone Roses tee with the sleeves torn away to show arms full of mismatched black ink and thick thighs under black skinny jeans. He crossed behind the truck and ignored all of his belongings to instead open the passenger door and lift out a pet carrier.

“Hey, Puppy Power, maybe we’ll have new friends,” Nick had said. 

(Hmph.)

**002.**  
“Puppy Power Forever, come _on_.”

It’s always when it’s raining outside that Puppy needs to linger the most. On the one hand, Nick can understand; the world is interesting in the rain, colors dampened until the textures pop more and light reflects off every surface slick with water. But that is something he prefers to admire from his window, or perhaps in a stylish gif, and not from the middle of the pavement as Puppy goes bonanza on the fire hydrant because it smells like so many other dogs.

Puppy pays him no mind. She never does. Nick heaves a sigh and swaps the umbrella and leash between his hands.

A light goes on in the window just behind the hydrant, and Nick looks up. The house next door was empty for so long that it’s almost shocking to think someone lives there now, that fit boy and the creature in the carrier. 

Nick stares at the shape in the window. It looks from here like just a fairly small white cat, round like a pillow. “Hey, Pup,” he tries. “It’s your friend; let’s go see ‘im.”

The grass and mud are soft beneath Nick’s boots as they cross the stripe of lawn oasis. Puppy hops around a bit and loses her footing, going belly-down in the mud, but Nick just rolls his eyes and taps two knuckles against the glass to get the little white cat’s attention.

“Jesus Christ!” 

It is, in fact, a monster. The cat may be small, but it is a ball of face and hate and squished-up nose and lizardly yellow eyes and _pure hellfire hatred_. Nick actually lifts both hands as well he can with the umbrella and leash still clutched between his fingers and murmurs, _sorry to disturb you, holy shit_.

But Puppy just looks up at the window from where she’s wallowing happily in the wet grass, and her tongue lolls out.

**003.**  
When they get home, Nick has to carry Puppy straight to the bath because she’s so covered in mud and he likes the color of his furniture being “not brown.” By the time she’s clean, he’s filthy and sopping wet. 

“You’re a menace,” he coos as he towels her dry. “Yes, you are. You’re the bane of my existence and I love you.”

Puppy licks his nose and then trots away, clean and fluffy, her toenails clacking on the floor. 

**004.**  
By the time the bathroom and Nick are both clean and dry, it’s coffee o’clock. Nick sips from his favorite mug as he wanders the house, trying to find whatever messy art installation Puppy’s created while he was busy, but everything looks—miraculously—in order.

He finds her sitting in the window, staring across the way at the evil white cat. She’s pining. Her paws and nose press against the glass.

“Have you been here this whole time?” Nick asks. He pets her back and she barely looks up. Through the other window, the cat might be staring back through the rain, but his owner isn’t: the fit boy is sitting on his couch, watching television and eating a slice of pizza. 

**005.**  
If Nick watches him for a while, it’s only to keep Puppy company.

**006.**  
Before the boy and the cat moved across the way, it was a comedy of errors to arrive home from work every afternoon. Puppy had inevitably discovered some new facet of the house and decided that she must claim it: boxes of cereal, expensive shoes, soaps from the side of the bathtub; Nick had sighed and cleaned it up—after taking a picture for Instagram, natch—and after a walk, the two settled down together to faff off until a friend called to take Nick to dinner or drinks and the cycle began a second time for the day.

Now that the beast cat lives across the way and sits in his window day and night, life has changed for Nick. When he arrives home, the house is still clean. Puppy, too, sits in their front window, staring across the easement with pure pining on her little face.

“I don’t get what you see in ‘im,” Nick confesses to her. He rubs her muzzle and kisses her between the ears. “You’re much too pretty to settle.”

Puppy just pants.

“Yeah, I know,” Nick says. “Maybe I’m the one with no taste.”

**007.**  
Nick is fairly certain that isn’t true. The cat might be a Picasso, but his owner is a Michelangelo statue with the ass of a Rubens. He’s much too pretty to settle for Nick, really.

**008.**  
It’s not that Nick’s looked into Beast Cat’s window _with_ Puppy, or anything. It’s one thing for a dog to be a voyeur and completely another thing for a human. It’s just that he can’t help _glancing_ to see whether it’s really still that cat that poor pining Puppy is in love with, and sometimes Pretty Boy is glancing back at the same time.

**009.**  
After about a week, they’re looking simultaneously, and Nick doesn’t dart his eyes away like he’d never been looking.

Instead, he lifts Puppy’s paw and helps her wave.

The Pretty Boy makes a sourpuss face.

Oh, well.

“We tried,” Nick consoles Puppy Power Forever.

**010.**  
The next day, the Sourpuss Boy is sitting in the window with his sour pussycat. He’s petting the cat with one hand and playing with his iPhone in the other, so it isn’t like he’s staring across the gap with longing in his eyes the way Puppy—only Puppy, Nick thinks rather sternly to himself; not Puppy _and Nick_ \--is. 

But this time, when Nick lifts Puppy’s paw and waves again, the boy doesn’t grimace quite so grumpily.

**011.**   
The pattern continues the same way for about a month. Nick’s life regains its routine predictability once more—but with nicer shoes, now that Puppy is distracted enough not to chew them to bits.

And then, one day Nick returns to an empty house. Puppy is gone.

**012.**  
He panics. Nick is halfway down the block running before it hits him—

Puppy is probably much closer to home. He hesitates before turning back, just in case he’s gone a bit crazy, but in the end he does jog up the steps to the Pretty Boy’s house and ring the bell.

“Hello, stalker,” Pretty Boy says. He’s wearing a too-loose shirt with the sleeves cut off. It dips low enough across his sternum that Nick can see a pale shadow of chest hair, and the cut of his cheekbones is even sharper up close. His hair looks soft, if a little too long. “Decided to leave your creepy bell tower?”

“It’s a living room,” Nick says, in the most intelligent response of his life. “Er—my dog, Puppy, that’s her name and what she is, Puppy, she isn’t… here, is she?”

Pretty Boy blinks, then turns around. He bends down and then there’s Puppy, wriggling and dumb and happy, her fat dog belly in Pretty Boy’s hands as he holds her like a time-bomb. “I thought she was just really receptive to being told what species she is. I found her in my kitchen.” He pauses. “Did you put her there just so you could ring my bell?”

“No!” Nick would rather like to ring Pretty Boy’s bell. “She just escaped somehow while I was at work.”

Puppy’s tail thwaps Pretty Boy’s arm, and he thrusts her out towards Nick in the universal gesture for ‘take this weird thing.’ Nick does, cooing, and cradles Puppy like the sweet baby she is so he can shower her nose in kisses and chastise her for scaring him.

There’s a grating moo from the ground. It’s the cat, winding its way around Pretty Boy’s pretty ankles. The cat is not any prettier; in fact, it looks more squished from this angle, and Nick’s never fancied cat paws. They aren’t nearly as cute as puppy paws. Pretty Boy clearly disagrees, as he lifts up the cat and lets it knead at his chest. Tiny claws poke holes in the worn fabric of the shirt.

“Well,” Nick says into the silence, “Thanks for finding her.”

“She found us.”

“Right, well, thanks for letting her stay until I could get her.” Nick bites the inside of his cheek. “I’m Nick, by the way.”

“That’s nice.” Pretty Boy rubs the ugly cat’s belly and it makes that cow-with-a-frog-in-its-throat noise again.

“What’s your name?”

“Oh,” Pretty Boy says. “It’s Louis.” He tickles the cat under its chin-area. It doesn’t seem to have enough neck for a proper chin. “This is Hugh.”

The noise Puppy makes upon learning her great love’s name is the sound that, surely, Cupid’s arrows produce upon hitting their marks.

**013.**  
A week later, Nick is attacked in his front hall.

“Jesus Christ!” he yells, cowering. “Take my money! Take whatever you want!”

“Moo!” meows Hugh the Cat in his dump-truck voice, continuing to slash Nick’s shins to ribbons with his claws. 

Puppy barks in adoration and does absolutely nothing to save her best pal. Some guard dog.

**014.**  
Eventually, Nick manages to get some oven mitts on and use those to scoop up Hugh, hissing and mooing, and he marches the demon across the street. Puppy follows, tail wagging so fast Nick is a little afraid that she might take off like a helicopter. 

Without a free hand, Nick just kicks at Louis’ door a few times. “Open up! I have your cat!”

Louis opens right away, like he’d been waiting in the vestibule just for this. “Oh, so you do. Did he behave himself?”

“No. Does he have rabies, by any chance?”

“Not unless he got it from your dog,” Louis says cheerfully. He coddles Hugh like he’s a milktooth kitten instead of the slathering spawn of an underfed cheetah and the Yeti. “Did you, li’l man? No rabies for you, no.”

The boy might be pretty, but he’s definitely insane. “How did your cat get into my house?”

Louis’ blue eyes are two shades too innocent when he looks up and shrugs. “I don’t have any idea, mate. I’ve been here all day and didn’t notice a thing.”

**015.**  
That night, Nick sits Puppy down for a Serious Talk.

“Look, Puppy Power Forever, I know you like Hugh, but I don’t think he’s right for you,” Nick says, petting Puppy’s silky ear. Her eyes fill with adolescent petulance, and the room fills with puppydog flatulence. Nick sighs. “I know it’s difficult, but I just don’t think he’s going to prove worth the work.”

Puppy whimpers and rests her chin—because she has one—on Nick’s thigh. 

“I’m sure he’s charming,” Nick agrees. “But is that enough?”

**016.**  
Hugh becomes a standard feature in Nick’s entryway after that.

Nick’s shin becomes Hugh’s new scratching post.

Nick stops wearing jeans that he doesn’t want shredded.

**017.**  
By the end of August, Louis comes to Nick’s door to get Hugh at the end of a reasonable span of time for a dog and cat to cuddle. 

**018.**  
In September, Louis brings Hugh over while Nick is actually home. He stays, too.

They sit on the sofa and watch as Puppy rolls over onto her back, belly pink, and Hugh sprawls next to her with his non-chin in her non-armpit.

“They’re bizarre,” Louis mutters.

“They are,” Nick agrees. “Don’t really match, do they?”

“No,” Louis agrees. “Hugh has pedigree.”

**019.**  
In October, there is no pretense that Louis and Hugh come over now more for Louis than Hugh; Puppy and the beast still enjoy each other, and Nick appreciates that her ardor is being taken out on something—anything—other than his expensive belongings now, but Nick has a sneaking suspicion that he might like Louis even more than Puppy likes Hugh.

They are the same species, at least.

On Halloween, Nick dresses Puppy in a smart little fairy princess costume with her tail poking out of her tutu and a tiara on her regal head. She looks miserable, but he knows she actually loves it.

“Just think how impressed Hugh will be,” he tells her. She cheers. Marginally.

When Louis rings the bell, there’s an arrow through his skull and Hugh’s normally-white fur is bright green.

“What on earth did you do to your dog?”

“She’s a princess,” Nick says. “A fairy princess.”

“Don’t live vicariously through your pets, Nicholas,” Louis says primly. “It’s unkind.”

“And what is Hugh, then?”

Louis sets Hugh down and Puppy runs over to sniff her life-mate, yipping in distress when he smells like Manic Panic or spray paint or whatever Louis’ dyed him with. (Later, Louis assures Nick that it was just green Kool-Aid that Puppy’s licked up and puked chartreuse all over the house.) “He’s the Hulk.”

Nick measures how small Louis’ waist is between two of his big hands. “Oh, who’s living vicariously now?”

**020.**  
When Louis invites Nick and Puppy to come to his for Thanksgiving, he adds like an afterthought, “You can meet my family.”

Nick and Louis have been kissing since September, but that’s only two months and they only met because their pets have interspecies fetishes and Thanksgiving is a properly big holiday to meet someone’s family and Nick is older than Louis and Louis has a _family?_ ; he doesn’t seem the sort to have a _family_ , somehow, and Nick’s family were going to go to Vail and ski for the holiday because everyone is too tired to cook these days and what will they say if Nick doesn’t come along, although if Louis’ family is coming to town then maybe he can’t watch Puppy for him after all, so he might as well—

“You don’t have to,” Louis says quietly.

It’s just that they’ve never made a big enough deal about it that Nick would have thought Louis even noticed they were dating, much less told his family.

They haven’t actually been on a date, they’ve just been. Chaperoning.

“No,” Nick says. “I will. Of course I will. But only if you and I can go on an actual date first, that’s a date, without the animals and without your family there.”

**021.**  
“Okay,” Louis says.

**022.**  
By the time New Year’s rolls around, Nick doesn’t have to go over to Louis’ house anymore. He’s always already there. It’s not that he’s moved in, officially; that seems silly when he has his own house so close and he likes having his own house, because Louis is a slob and because there’s always kitty litter on fucking everything there. It’s just that he sleeps there most nights and Puppy naps there most days, lying in spots of sun with Hugh stretched along her back, their fur warming each other as they breathe little panting animal snores.

When midnight drops as the year changes and the world rolls over, or just keeps spinning, Louis kisses Nick. Puppy rolls over and licks Hugh’s fur. Hugh chases the spot to bathe it clean right after.

**023.**  
The winter is long and cold and hard.

**024.**  
Nick arrives home.

There’s a ruckus of debris on the carpeting in the front hall. He notices after stomping ice off his boots and hanging his heavy, sodden coat in the closet. He had a better coat, but left it somewhere.

He knows where. He won’t get it back.

“Puppy,” Nick calls, voice low and as brittle as the tree branches outside. “What’ve you destroyed _now_?”

Even her bark sounds like she blames him, too. Crushed into pieces in the front hall are some single-serving packets of oatmeal and the stuffing from her dog bed. Nick exhales. Cleans it up. 

Puppy curls on the windowseat, staring across the way at the blob of white just visible beneath the hanging of icicles. She is a small little semicircle of sadness and reproach. She lets Nick pet down her soft back and between her ears, but she doesn’t make him feel any better for it.

**025.**  
In March, Nick can hear the melancholy keening before he even unlocks the door. Puppy stands at attention on the windowseat, lowing urgently at the glass. 

When Nick follows her gaze, there are new plants in the window across the way. Ferns and ficus. There’s no room there for a small, fluffy, ugly white cat.

“I’m sorry, Pup,” Nick whispers, and buries his face in her ruff. Finally, Nick cries. 

**026.**  
Puppy cries in the window all night.

It’s sunny the next morning, a real sunshine that feels like spring may someday dawn, although it still is not today. Nick rolls over where he fell asleep on the sofa and a ray of light hits his face, beaming down a sign.

Nick gives Puppy an extra-long pet, then makes a cup of coffee. While it brews, he takes a fat felt-tip pen and scrawls a note across one of his yellow legal pads. 

Three cups of coffee later, he bundles into his coat again right over his pajamas and latches Puppy onto her leash and opens the door. The air is cold, but he can still breathe. The yellow legal pad feels warm in his hand.

“C’mon, Puppy Power Forever,” Nick murmurs.

**027.**  
He tapes the note on the outside of the window, above where the waxy leaves of the plants will hide its message.

_Dear neighbor,_

_This might sound ridiculous, but I thought that you should know that my dog is still madly in love with your cat… and has been for nearly a year! She spends all day on the windowseat in my house, looking across the gap to where your cat sits in the windowsill. It is the happiest time that she has._

_Now that there are potted plants there, she is heartbroken. But she keeps looking for your cat everywhere. Maybe when he seemed so easy to find, she took him for granted. Not anymore, though._

_Maybe your potted plants could move to another window?_

_xx  
Nick_

**028.**  
The plants are still there the next day, but Puppy has stopped crying. She sits on the windowseat and stares across the gap at the way the world melts, and she waits.

**029.**  
At first, Nick thinks it’s an April Fool’s Day trick, because it is now April and he is, as has been made abundantly clear, a fool. But when he arrives home, finally warm enough to go without a heavy coat, he stumbles into a briar patch of barbed wire just inside the door.

“What the hell?” He jumps up and away.

Hugh hisses merrily and takes another swipe at Nick’s shinbone. His claws are mother-of-pearl knives.

“Well,” Nick says, bleeding. “Hello to you, too. Are you back, then?”

Puppy yips and bounces here there here there before rubbing her face against Hugh’s side. Hugh embeds his claws into Nick’s foot.

Nick squats down and rubs his fingers through Hugh’s fur. Longer than Puppy’s, feels different between his fingers. Hugh retracts his claws, and Nick keeps petting until the skin beneath hair and the bones beneath skin begin to rumble. Hugh is purring.

“Are you both back?” Nick whispers.

Hugh just moos.

**30.**  
Only Hugh comes back. Nick waits. He waits out April, and he waits out May, and then June hits in a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder and warm, sticky summer heat before it’s even officially summer on the calendar.

Nick eats a popsicle and does not drop any for Puppy, no matter how hard Hugh sinks claws into his thigh.

“This is ridiculous,” Nick mutters to the little fur monsters. “He’s so stubborn, you know.”

They don’t answer. Nick eats another popsicle and lets Puppy finish this one, because his teeth are cold and it’s funny when her tongue is blue. It’s been so muggy outside that to keep the peace indoors, he’s kept his curtains closed, but today, today, Hugh showed up later than usual. 

Puppy barks and sticks out her blue tongue. She trots to the windowseat and jumps up, her little legs flailing, and Hugh follows her. He’s surprisingly graceful.

Nick hesitates. If his hand shakes when he pulls aside the curtain, then Puppy and Hugh won’t tell. 

Outside, the rain has stopped and the haze burned way. The sky is clear. Blue. It—it reminds Nick of Louis’ eyes, and he’s never been one for sop. But Nick stares across the gap, the sun painting a golden stripe across Louis’ face.

Louis stares back. The ferns and ficus are gone, and instead, sitting on the windowsill is a fine-tailored heavy coat. Slowly, Louis sticks his reply up in the window on familiar yellow legal paper.

_Who needs potted plants?_

_x  
Louis_

_P.S._

_For true love._


End file.
